Mining and large scale excavating operations may require fleets of haulage vehicles to transport excavated material, such as ore or overburden, from an area of excavation to a destination. For such an operation to be productive and profitable, the fleet of haulage vehicles must be efficiently operated. Efficient operation of a fleet of haulage vehicles is affected by numerous operation characteristics. For example, the grade and character of haul routes and the amount of payload have direct effects on haulage cycle time, equipment component wear, and fuel consumption which, in turn, directly affect productivity and profitability of the operation.
Computer-aided design (CAD) and visualization tools may be used to design, develop, and manufacture the haulage vehicles. Visualization tools have also been used to display products offered by a business. However, the information provided by such tools may be restricted to textual information and limited image data, such as a two-dimensional map of a work site or a two-dimensional image of a product.
One visualization tool is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,108,949 (the '949 patent) issued to Singh et al. The '949 patent describes a planning tool for determining an excavation strategy for a mine site. The planning tool uses the geometry of a site to determine an optimum excavation operation for a particular machine. The planning tool allows the user to select where to excavate and an orientation of an excavating tool of the machine. The optimum excavation operation may be determined based on a predicted excavation result, such as a volume of material excavated, energy expended, and time.
Although the system of the '949 patent may provide a tool for visualizing the operation of a machine, the information provided by the tool is limited. For example, the visualization tool of the '949 patent is based on the operation of a single machine and compares excavation operations of that one machine. However, in reality, many different types of machines can be used during an excavation operation, and each type of machine may be available in different models and configurations. In addition, the visualization tool only incorporates elevation information of the work site, thereby including a limited amount of information describing the work site and limiting the ability of the tool to provide an accurate prediction of the excavation result.
Furthermore, the visualization tool is used to make decisions about the excavation operation in real-time and not for more comprehensive long-term site solution planning. For example, the visualization tool does not allow adjusting the number of machines at the work site. Therefore, the user of the visualization tool cannot effectively optimize the efficiency of the excavation operation. Also, the visualization tool is limited to visualizing the operations of the machine within the boundaries of the material to be excavated or the operational limits of the machine. Therefore, the visualization tool is limited to a single work site, and the user cannot compare the characteristics of more than one work site to make a proper determination of where to excavate.
The disclosed method is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.